“If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. He won’t rebuke you for asking.” James 1:5
Heavenly Father, I begin today, like every day, grateful for your new mercies, eternal kindness, and measureless grace. Today I need what you promise in this verse. I need wisdom—wisdom for loving well in complex relationships and broken storylines. I’m sure I’m in good company.
Abba, what’s the difference between (1) appropriately overlooking a fault, (2) wrongly covering up something that needs exposing, (3) trying to deal with a “sticky” matter too quickly and in the flesh, and (4) waiting upon you for a better time, healthier “head space,” and a prayed through strategy?
When does our patience turn into denial, or our pain morph into a spirit of get-even? When should we risk losing relationship because of a greater commitment to honor you and protect others? What things are only going to change in heaven? How do we love someone who we experience as toxically self-centered, but on the inside lives a fragile, stranger-to-grace, traumatized little boy or girl?
Father, help me and my friends steward our own history of hurts, traumas, and emotional triggers. Slow us down when we begin to import backlogged pain into fresh wounds. Someone who hurt us this year isn’t responsible for the accumulated harm we carry from previous years.
Continue to reveal the wounds we carry still needing your grace, surgery, and rehab. And make clear to us the relational patterns we’ve learned in response to abandonment, betrayal, neglect, and abuse. Abba, grant us mentors, grace, and friendships that will help us heal, repent, and repair.
Because of the Gospel, a Day is coming when we will be made “perfect in love,” and we will love perfectly forever. That Day isn’t yet, but what IS “yet” is the fact you love us perfectly right now. That’s the best news ever. So Very Amen.